SquidConfiguration

Configuration

Getting basic Squid running wasn't too hard at all: As root user edit:

/etc/squid/squid.conf

Add to the top:

visible_hostname hda.local
http_port 3128 transparent accel vport
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 1000 16 256
cache_access_log /var/log/squid/access.log

acl intranet src 192.168.0.0/24
http_access allow intranet

Referred to this article for the approach. But note that there is a correction to the acl intranet src 192.168.0.0/24 line, included above. He was missing src in that line.

Start Up

Start Squid:

service squid start

Set Up Clients

In web browser, goto its settings or preferences and enter a Proxy Server using host/server URL as: hda. No username or password required.

Now when you view a web page, it stores a cached copy on the server. Then when you look at it again, it uses the cache instead of downloading it all again.

Monitor

To see if it is working watch the log file expand while browsing to new pages: tail -f /var/log/squid/access.log

Issues

Browsing to our custom HDA domains doesn't work, e.g. http://wiki or http://calendar. There are various approaches to fixing this, but I don't know how to do them so far.

Making it transparent, so clients don't need any web browser proxy server settings, is also very possible. You use iptables (also already installed and running) to forward port 80 traffic to the squid server port 3128. I tried but didn't get it working. I was sure how to remove the iptables entries, so I just turned that service off and all was back to normal.